Poll: Obama's Re-Elect Number Falls To 29%

Lot of bad news here for the Clinical Depressive of the United States.

By a margin of 51 percent to 40 percent, Americans doubt the package of tax cuts and spending proposals intended to jumpstart job creation that Obama submitted to Congress this week will bring down the 9.1 percent jobless rate....

Compounding Obama’s challenge is that 56 percent of independents, whom the president won in 2008 and will need to win in 2012, are skeptical it will work.

Yeah, it won't. Next.

On the economy, 29 percent of independents approve of the job Obama is doing while 66 percent disapprove. Obama is weakest among independents when it comes to his ability to reduce the deficit -- under a quarter of those respondents approve of his job in that category, while 67 percent disapprove. On job creation, 30 percent of independents approve of Obama’s efforts while 63 percent disapprove. He scored slightly better among independents on health care with 34 percent approving and 57 percent disapproving.

57% disapproval on health care, among independents, is a relative strength for Obama.

Partly this is because the Democrats have cut $500 billion from Medicare and propose cutting still more.

While I'm very down on Michele Bachmann, I have to give her props for insisting that this inconvenient fact for Democrats be mentioned early and often. (Romney also mentioned it, but sort of off-handedly. It must be a central point.)

The Democrats, as I keep saying, proposing cutting Medicare but not reforming it; that means, ultimately, that $500 billion in cuts will result in just about $500 billion in actual service reduction.

If you reform Medicare, it's possible -- plausible; even likely -- that $500 billion in cuts will translate to some lesser amount of actual service reduction; maybe $500 billion in payment reduction will wind up only resulting in $360 billion in service reduction. Still a hit, but not as much of one.

And yet, for some reason, Kaus and the Democrats think it's a good thing, something to brag on, that Democrats keep cutting Medicare without making actual reforms to the system that might make it do more with less. So every dollar in cuts is just a straight-up dollar less in benefit.